Fundamentals of Communications Access

Technologies: FDMA, TDMA, CDMA,

OFDMA, AND SDMA
Accommodating multiple users in a single bandwidth is the essence of access
methods.
Jan 22, 2013 Lou Frenzel

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An introduction to the access technologies that allow multiple users to share a
common communications channel.
Access methods are multiplexing techniques that provide communications services to
multiple users in a single-bandwidth wired or wireless medium. Communications
channels, whether theyre wireless spectrum segments or cable connections, are
expensive. Communications services providers must engage multiple paid users over
limited resources to make a profit. Access methods allow many users to share these
limited channels to provide the economy of scale necessary for a successful
communications business. There are five basic access or multiplexing methods:
frequency division multiple access (FDMA), time division multiple access (TDMA),
code division multiple access (CDMA), orthogonal frequency division multiple access
(OFDMA), and spatial division multiple access (SDMA).
Table Of Contents

FDMA
TDMA
CDMA
OFDMA
SDMA
Other Methods
References

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FDMA
FDMA is the process of dividing one channel or bandwidth into multiple individual
bands, each for use by a single user (Fig. 1). Each individual band or channel is wide
enough to accommodate the signal spectra of the transmissions to be propagated. The
data to be transmitted is modulated on to each subcarrier, and all of them are linearly
mixed together.

1. FDMA divides the shared medium bandwidth into individual channels. Subcarriers
modulated by the information to be transmitted occupy each subchannel.
The best example of this is the cable television system. The medium is a single coax
cable that is used to broadcast hundreds of channels of video/audio programming to
homes. The coax cable has a useful bandwidth from about 4 MHz to 1 GHz. This
bandwidth is divided up into 6-MHz wide channels. Initially, one TV station or
channel used a single 6-MHz band. But with digital techniques, multiple TV channels
may share a single band today thanks to compression and multiplexing techniques
used in each channel.
This technique is also used in fiber optic communications systems. A single fiber
optic cable has enormous bandwidth that can be subdivided to provide FDMA.

Different data or information sources are each assigned a different light frequency for
transmission. Light generally isnt referred to by frequency but by its wavelength ().
As a result, fiber optic FDMA is called wavelength division multiple access (WDMA)
or just wavelength division multiplexing (WDM).
One of the older FDMA systems is the original analog telephone system, which used a
hierarchy of frequency multiplex techniques to put multiple telephone calls on single
line. The analog 300-Hz to 3400-Hz voice signals were used to modulate subcarriers
in 12 channels from 60 kHz to 108 kHz. Modulator/mixers created single sideband
(SSB) signals, both upper and lower sidebands. These subcarriers were then further
frequency multiplexed on subcarriers in the 312-kHz to 552-kHz range using the same
modulation methods. At the receiving end of the system, the signals were sorted out
and recovered with filters and demodulators.
Original aerospace telemetry systems used an FDMA system to accommodate
multiple sensor data on a single radio channel. Early satellite systems shared
individual 36-MHz bandwidth transponders in the 4-GHz to 6-GHz range with
multiple voice, video, or data signals via FDMA. Today, all of these applications use
TDMA digital techniques.
TDMA
TDMA is a digital technique that divides a single channel or band into time slots.
Each time slot is used to transmit one byte or another digital segment of each signal in
sequential serial data format. This technique works well with slow voice data signals,
but its also useful for compressed video and other high-speed data.
A good example is the widely used T1 transmission system, which has been used for
years in the telecom industry. T1 lines carry up to 24 individual voice telephone calls
on a single line (Fig. 2). Each voice signal usually covers 300 Hz to 3000 Hz and is
digitized at an 8-kHz rate, which is just a bit more than the minimal Nyquist rate of
two times the highest-frequency component needed to retain all the analog content.

2. This T1 digital telephony frame illustrates TDM and TDMA. Each time slot is
allocated to one user. The high data rate makes the user unaware of the lack of
simultaneity.
The digitized voice appears as individual serial bytes that occur at a 64-kHz rate, and
24 of these bytes are interleaved, producing one T1 frame of data. The frame occurs at
a 1.536-MHz rate (24 by 64 kHz) for a total of 192 bits. A single synchronizing bit is
added for timing purposes for an overall data rate of 1.544 Mbits/s. At the receiving
end, the individual voice bytes are recovered at the 64-kHz rate and passed through a
digital-to-analog converter (DAC) that reproduces the analog voice.
The basic GSM (Global System of Mobile Communications) cellular phone system is
TDMA-based. It divides up the radio spectrum into 200-kHz bands and then uses time
division techniques to put eight voice calls into one channel. Figure 3 shows one
frame of a GSM TDMA signal. The eight time slots can be voice signals or data such
as texts or e-mails. The frame is transmitted at a 270-kbit/s rate using Gaussian
minimum shift keying (GMSK), which is a form of frequency shift keying (FSK)
modulation.

3. This GSM digital cellular method shows how up to eight users can share a 200-kHz
channel in different time slots within a frame of 1248 bits.
CDMA
CDMA is another pure digital technique. It is also known as spread spectrum because
it takes the digitized version of an analog signal and spreads it out over a wider
bandwidth at a lower power level. This method is called direct sequence spread
spectrum (DSSS) as well (Fig. 4). The digitized and compressed voice signal in serial

data form is spread by processing it in an XOR circuit along with a chipping signal at
a much higher frequency. In the cdma IS-95 standard, a 1.2288-Mbit/s chipping signal
spreads the digitized compressed voice at 13 kbits/s.

4. Spread spectrum is the technique of CDMA. The compressed and digitized voice
signal is processed in an XOR logic circuit along with a higher-frequency coded
chipping signal. The result is that the digital voice is spread over a much wider
bandwidth that can be shared with other users using different codes.
The chipping signal is derived from a pseudorandom code generator that assigns a
unique code to each user of the channel. This code spreads the voice signal over a
bandwidth of 1.25 MHz. The resulting signal is at a low power level and appears more
like noise. Many such signals can occupy the same channel simultaneously. For
example, using 64 unique chipping codes allows up to 64 users to occupy the same
1.25-MHz channel at the same time. At the receiver, a correlating circuit finds and
identifies a specific callers code and recovers it.
The third generation (3G) cell-phone technology called wideband CDMA (WCDMA)
uses a similar method with compressed voice and 3.84-Mbit/s chipping codes in a 5MHz channel to allow multiple users to share the same band.
OFDMA
OFDMA is the access technique used in Long-Term Evolution (LTE) cellular systems
to accommodate multiple users in a given bandwidth. Orthogonal frequency division
multiplexing (OFDM) is a modulation method that divides a channel into multiple

narrow orthogonal bands that are spaced so they dont interfere with one another.
Each band is divided into hundreds or even thousands of 15-kHz wide subcarriers.
The data to be transmitted is divided into many lower-speed bit streams and
modulated onto the subcarriers. Time slots within each subchannel data stream are
used to package the data to be transmitted (Fig. 5). This technique is very spectrally
efficient, so it provides very high data rates. It also is less affected by multipath
propagation effects.

5. OFDMA assigns a group of subcarriers to each user. The subcarriers are part of
the large number of subcarriers used to implement OFDM for LTE. The data may be
voice, video, or something else, and its assembled into time segments that are then
transmitted over some of the assigned subcarriers.
To implement OFDMA, each user is assigned a group of subchannels and related time
slots. The smallest group of subchannels assigned is 12 and called a resource block
(RB). The system assigns the number of RBs to each user as needed.

SDMA
SDMA uses physical separation methods that permit the sharing of wireless channels.
For instance, a single channel may be used simultaneously if the users are spaced far
enough from one another to avoid interference. Known as frequency reuse, the
method is widely used in cellular radio systems. Cell sites are spaced from one
another to minimize interference.
In addition to spacing, directional antennas are used to avoid interference. Most cell
sites use three antennas to create 120 sectors that allow frequency sharing (Fig. 6a).
New technologies like smart antennas or adaptive arrays use dynamic beamforming to
shrink signals into narrow beams that can be focused on specific users, excluding all
others (Fig. 6b).

6. SDMA separates users on shared frequencies by isolating them with directional

antennas. Most cell sites have three antenna arrays to separate their coverage into
isolated 120 sectors (a). Adaptive arrays use beamforming to pinpoint desired users
while ignoring any others on the same frequency (b).
One unique variation of SDMA, polarization division multiple access (PDMA),
separates signals by using different polarizations of the antennas. Two different
signals then can use the same frequency, one transmitting a vertically polarized signal
and the other transmitting a horizontally polarized signal.

The signals wont interfere with one another even if theyre on the same frequency
because theyre orthogonal and the antennas wont respond to the oppositely polarized
signal. Separate vertical and horizontal receiver antennas are used to recover the two
orthogonal signals. This technique is widely used in satellite systems.
Polarization is also used for multiplexing in fiber optic systems. The new 100-Gbit/s
systems use dual polarization quadrature phase shift keying (DP-QPSK) to achieve
high speeds on a single fiber. The high-speed data is divided into two slower data
streams, one using vertical light polarization and the other horizontal light
polarization. Polarization filters separate the two signals at the transmitter and receiver
and merge them back into the high-speed stream.
Other Methods
A unique and widely used method of multiple access is carrier sense multiple access
with collision detection (CSMA-CD). This is the classical access method used in
Ethernet local-area networks (LANs). It allows multiple users of the network to access
the single cable for transmission. All network nodes listen continuously. When they
want to send data, they listen first and then transmit if no other signals are on the line.
For instance, the transmission will be one packet or frame. Then the process repeats.
If two or more transmissions occur simultaneously, a collision occurs. The network
interface circuitry can detect a collision, and then the nodes will wait a random time
before retransmitting.
A variation of this method is called carrier sense multiple access with collision
avoidance (CSMA-CA). This method is similar to CSMA-CD. However, a special
scheduling algorithm is used to determine the appropriate time to transmit over the
shared channel. While the CSMA-CD technique is most used in wired networks,
CSMA-CA is the preferred method in wireless networks.